Hang around Twitter for long enough and there's a good chance that you'll see people rehashing jokes that clearly aren't theirs, whether they're spam bots or less-than-original friends. You might not see that copy-pasted humor for much longer, though: Plagiarism Is Bad has noticed that Twitter is deleting and hiding rip-off joke tweets due to reports "from the copyright holder." While the causes likely vary, freelance writer Olga Lexell says that it's because she genuinely depends on Twitter for a living. She's field-testing jokes, and would rather not have others claim them as their own.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group that defends civil liberties in the digital world, is facing off against the Entertainment Software Association, the organization that represents most major video game publishers in the US. The EFF wants to allow players to put abandoned games back online and has asked the US Copyright Office for an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This would allow players to legally modify the code of online games that are no longer supported by publishers, in the hope of reconnecting these titles to new, third-party servers. This includes games like Battlefield 1942, Star Wars: Battlefront, SOCOM 4, Resistance: Fall of Man and Mario Kart Wii. Many modern games rely on servers to function; if Activision pulled the plug on Destiny, for example, even its single-player campaign would disappear, since the entire game needs an online connection.

If you've noticed a crowdfunding project that was ripping off someone else's work to make a pitch, you're not alone. Kickstarter has posted its first transparency report, and it notes that there were 282 Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests in 2014 -- a notable amount considering that there were 68,668 total projects that year. The company only took action against 44 percent of them, but that still means that it had to scrub content (or in some cases, whole projects) in 123 campaigns.

You wouldn't think that genealogy websites would have much need to defend copyrights, but they're apparently quite zealous -- so long as you're interested in alien spaceships, at least. Ancestry.com has forced enthusiast site The Black Vault to take down legions of declassified US records on UFO research because some of them were taken from its Fold3 subsidiary. While the documents are public domain, their digital copies supposedly aren't -- Black Vault has to either get permission or digitize the records itself in order to post this content online, a spokeswoman says.

Reddit may not be subject to as much legal scrutiny as tech giants like Google or Microsoft, but there's enough of it that the internet community has published its first transparency report. The site says that it received 55 demands for user info through subpoenas, search warrants and emergency requests in 2014. That's a tiny amount compared to the 174 million total redditors, but that makes it a bigger target than Dropbox and other services that you'd think would be more conducive to secret activity. The site had a bigger problem on its hands with 218 copyright and trademark takedown requests, although it's not clear if that includes any calls to pull celebrity photos stolen in last year's iCloud breach.

Google may be bending over backwards to eliminate piracy in its search results, but it's clearer than ever that the internet giant is fighting an uphill battle. TorrentFreak has sifted through Google's weekly data to discover that the company fielded over 345 million copyright takedown requests in 2014, or a rate of nearly one million per day. As you might have guessed, most of these calls for action come from movie and music studios trying to pull links to bootleg copies of their work. The British Phonographic Industry is by far the most aggressive copyright holder -- it asked Google to yank more than 60 million music-related links.

Tinkering to get better performance out of your ride is one of the more rewarding aspects of vehicle ownership. The thing is, as cars have become more and more computer-dependent, getting a horsepower boost or better gas mileage by swapping exhaust systems or air filters is just the beginning. Sometimes to hit the level you'd want, tweaking the engine control or primary control module by aftermarket means is necessary. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, however, that puts wrenching on your vehicle into murky legal territory. The folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) have your back and are hoping to keep the DMCA out from under your hood, though. As Autoblog notes, the EFF is hoping its petition to the federal copyright office will result in removing some of the legal issues that can arise from futzing with your car's electronic brain-box.

Today's dispatch from the department of irony comes courtesy of Marvel Studios. When the trailer for The Avengers: Age of Ultron prematurely appeared online, the studio went into lockdown to find the leaker's identity. According to documents found by Mashable, the outfit has traced the incident to a Google Drive account in the name of "John Gazelle," and a federal court has ordered Google to hand over their details by November 18th - presumably in order to make an example of the individual. Still, it seems that while Captain America can battle oppressive computer systems that track the activities of everyone in the world, it's happy to stick to the status quo in the real world.

It's great that many games have strong online components, but there's a dark side to that connectedness: if the developers (or their partners) shut down necessary servers, those titles are likely to break. You won't have to worry about your favorite game going dark if the Electronic Frontier Foundation has its way, however. The liberty-minded advocacy group has filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemption request with the Library of Congress that would give Americans the right to keep online play alive in old, abandoned games by modifying the code to point to unofficial services. While the request wouldn't cover games where most of the content is stored online, it would address single-player releases that demand internet-based activation just to run.

Grooveshark's disappearing and reappearing act looks like it could finally come to an end; permanently. A Manhattan judge has ruled that because Grooveshark employees themselves had uploaded 5,977 songs to the service and infringing on copyrights in the process, the outfit couldn't be granted safe harbor for hosting music from the likes of Jay-Z and Madonna. Meaning, the firm's previous method of compliance under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was null and void because it wasn't users who uploaded the copyrighted material (which would be subsequently removed upon request), it was in-house staffers including CEO Samuel Tarantino and CTO Joshua Greenberg, according to The New York Times. Reuters notes that there was also evidence of internal communications from Greenberg that told employes to share music as much as possible from outside the office in an effort to foster growth -- all as a condition of employment.

Getting Democrats and Republicans to pass an act of Congress is the exception more than the rule. But if there's one thing both sides of the aisle can agree on, it's that the US policy for unlocking phones is backwards. Early last year, it became illegal to unlock your handset for use on other carriers unless your provider directly gives you the permission to do so. Thanks to moves from the Senate and House this month, legislation to remove this restriction is just a presidential signature away from passing; it's not a permanent solution, but at least it's a step in the right direction for consumer freedom.

The Android community just got a big (if brief) scare. In the space of a few days, Qualcomm has both made and retracted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request that took down 116 code repositories (many of them Android-focused) that were allegedly using the chip maker's confidential technology. As it turns out, quite a few of the targets were legitimate users running the company's open source software. And you'll definitely recognize some of the names -- the move shut down code bases maintained by the CyanogenMod custom ROM team, Sony and even Qualcomm itself. Suffice it to say that the removal would have created a lot of headaches if you wanted to modify Android for the many, many devices with Snapdragon processors.

To our delight, the recent ruling that phone subsidy unlocks are no longer protected by copyright law has sparked a lot of attention from the general public as well as the US government. However, some of the carriers are predictably not too excited by the amount of negative light it sheds on their own unlock policies. AT&T has taken to its public policy blog to discuss its viewpoint on the matter. Joan Marsh, VP of Federal Regulatory for the company, insists that "the ruling has very little impact on AT&T customers."

Marsh reiterates AT&T's unlock policy by stating: "if we have the unlock code or can reasonably get it from the manufacturer, AT&T currently will unlock a device for any customer whose account has been active for at least sixty days; whose account is in good standing and has no unpaid balance; and who has fulfilled his or her service agreement commitment. If the conditions are met we will unlock up to five devices per account per year."

We should have known that it wouldn't take long for someone in congress to take up the fight to re-legalize cellphone unlocking. Those championing the effort on the floor of the Senate are Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) , Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) who introduced the Wireless Consumer Choice Act this afternoon. After the Librarian of Congress declared that unlocking a cellphone violated copyright law under the DMCA (that's Digital Millennium Copyright Act) activists kicked into high gear in an attempt to prevent or reverse the decision. Consumer advocates quickly collected 100,000 signatures on a petition, forcing the White House to take a position on the matter. To the relief of many, including the globe trotters and ROM fanatics here at Engadget, President Obama backed our right to circumvent carrier locks -- within reason, of course. This is after FCC chairman Julius Genachowski voiced concerns that the ban could hamper competition and innovation.

Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California, is pushing a similar bill in the House of representatives, but its the bipartisan senate version that seems to be garnering the most attention. In a statement Blumenthal called the legislation "common sense, crucial for protecting consumer choice and important for ensuring healthy competition in the market." Obviously this is just the beginning of a long long journey and all the sponsors can do is hope and pray their sad little scrap of paper will one day become a law.

Update: It turns out that there's another bill that has been introduced in the Senate as well, penned by Oregon senator Rob Wyden.

The recent ruling that effectively bans third-party phone unlocking has ruffled more than a few feathers, and the people have spoken with their electronic signatures -- 114,322 of them, to be exact. Now the petition to the White House, which asks that DMCA protection of phone unlockers be reconsidered, has finally received an official response, and it appears that it's for the positive. The author of the letter is R. David Edelman, Senior Advisor for Internet, Innovation and Privacy.

"The White House agrees with the 114,000+ of you who believe that consumers should be able to unlock their cell phones without risking criminal or other penalties," Edelman writes. All told, the response matches that of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which wrote a letter to the Librarian of Congress in support of extending the exemption last year.

So what does this mean for us? Edelman states: "The Obama Administration would support a range of approaches to addressing this issue, including narrow legislative fixes in the telecommunications space that make it clear: neither criminal law nor technological locks should prevent consumers from switching carriers when they are no longer bound by a service agreement or other obligation." We're not going to see immediate change, but it appears that a chain of events is now in motion in which the FCC and Congress potentially play a huge role. We're not out of the woods yet, but it's relieving to see such a positive response -- along with a call to action -- from the government.

The petition to reinstate the DMCA protection of smartphone unlockers has reached 100,000 signatories on We The People. As it's now hit the golden limit, the White House will have to issue an official response explaining its stance on the matter. The petition also asked that if the Librarian of Congress wouldn't bring back the exemption, that a bill should be passed that enshrines the right into law. As soon we see the message from the West Wing, we'll let you know what they say.

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Thu, 21 Feb 2013 13:32:00 -050021|20471643http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/20/engadget-primed-phone-unlock/%3Futm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%26ncid%3Drss_semi
http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/20/engadget-primed-phone-unlock/http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/20/engadget-primed-phone-unlock/%3Futm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%23commentsPrimed goes in-depth on the technobabble you hear on Engadget every day -- we dig deep into each topic's history and how it benefits our lives. You can follow the series here. Looking to suggest a piece of technology for us to break down? Drop us a line at primed *at* engadget *dawt* com.

On October 25, 2012, the US librarian of Congress ruled that the act of unlocking your phone was no longer allowed under copyright law. The ruling, which has been severely criticized by consumer advocacy groups and tech enthusiasts across the country, declares that it's a copyright violation if you unlock your phone without the permission of the carrier it's locked to.

Why would such an unthreatening action result in heavy fees and possible jail time? After the break, we'll discuss what the ruling means for the future of the mobile industry, how it will impact consumers and if we should worry that our dentist's uncle's third cousin (once removed) is in trouble because he has an unlocked phone.

Something tells us they won't be handing out gold watches for this milestone. Just eight months after Google added copyright takedown requests to its Transparency Report, the search firm can claim to have almost exactly 10 million such requests from the RIAA. A dive into the numbers very quickly explains just how they built up so quickly. The RIAA and the music labels attached to it have topped at least the most recent monthly requests, and they're collectively issuing hundreds of thousands of notices every week. We certainly don't expect the industry group to hang up its hat just because it's at a nice, round figure: when pirate sites rarely stay down for long, and the RIAA all but accuses Google of being an accomplice to piracy despite censorship concerns, the current game of infringement whack-a-mole is only likely to continue.

It was great while it lasted, but the days of users legally unlocking their own phones is over.Back in October of last year, the Library of Congress added an exemption to the DMCA to allow folks to free their new phones for 90 days. That three month window has now closed. Of course, carriers are still free to offer unlocked handsets themselves, and some will also unlock them for you as long as certain conditions are met. "Legacy" or used handsets purchased before today can still be unlocked without any finger-wagging from federal courts.

So, what does this mean exactly? Well, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mitch Stoltz told us, "What's happening is not that the Copyright Office is declaring unlocking to be illegal, but rather that they're taking away a shield that unlockers could use in court if they get sued." This does make lawsuits much more likely according to him, but it's still up to the courts to decide the actual legality of phone unlocking. Indeed, it's a grim day for those who want true freedom over their own devices. Stoltz said to us, "This shows just how absurd the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is: a law that was supposed to stop the breaking of digital locks on copyrighted materials has led to the Librarian of Congress trying to regulate the used cellphone market."

And so it passed that Congress didst layeth its blessing on the jailbreaking and rooting of all manner of devices; the hacking community saw the miracle and rejoiced. But that amendment to the DMCA two years ago was just a temporary exemption and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been vigorously lobbying to get it reinstated. The Library of Congress has now done just that through a new three year extension, but with some serious caveats: After 90 days, unlocking of new phones will be verboten and all tablet mods will still be illegal. This differs from the 2010 decision which did allow unlocking, because the Librarian decided that a recent copyright ruling means fair use rules no longer apply to a handset's OS. It also said the exception isn't needed anymore because carrier rules regarding unlocking are now more liberal -- although the lawmaker may be confounding chicken with egg by that reasoning.

Twitter dispatched its first biannual Transparency Report -- revealing government requests for user info and content holdback along with DMCA takedown notices -- which spotlights the US as the most active by far. The company claimed it was aroused to action by Google, which has been doing it for the last two years and recently added copyright takedowns to its own reports. So far, Twitter says that while most nations requested user data 10 times or fewer, the US government made 679 such appeals, more than the entire rest of the world combined. It also showed how often it obeyed -- 75 percent of the time in the US; much less elsewhere -- and said that affected users are always notified unless the company is prohibited from doing so. As we also noted with Google's reports, DMCA takedowns were by far the most numerous requests, with 3,378 total affecting 5,874 users, and 599 offending items actually pulled (38 percent). Those appeals aren't broken down by company like Mountain View's, but if you think that Usher photo mashup you're using as an avatar might be a problem, check the source to see all the data.

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Tue, 03 Jul 2012 04:36:00 -040021|20270782http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/05/viacom-wins-appeal-against-youtube/%3Futm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%26ncid%3Drss_semi
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/05/viacom-wins-appeal-against-youtube/http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/05/viacom-wins-appeal-against-youtube/%3Futm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%23commentsIt's been almost two years since YouTube's triumph in its copyright infringement case against Viacom. As is the way of things, Viacom appealed the decision, and now the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has decided to breathe new life into Viacom's case. Apparently, the appeals judge didn't see eye to eye with the District Court's ruling that no reasonable jury could have found that YouTube had actual knowledge or awareness of infringement on its site.

You see, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires such awareness for service providers like YouTube to be guilty of copyright infringement, and that safe harbor provision was the grounds for YouTube's victory on summary judgment. Furthermore, to succeed on summary judgment, YouTube had to prove that no reasonable jury could find that it knew of any infringing activity. While the lower court felt that YouTube carried that burden, the appeals judge disagreed, and has remanded the case back down for the District Court to determine if YouTube knew about or willfully ignored the infringement. What does this mean? All we can say for sure is that it'll expend more judicial resources and make more money for the attorneys involved. The result could very well end up, once again, in YouTube's favor, but we'll have to wait and see.

Back in 2010, the US Copyright Office added a set of anti-circumvention exemptions to the DMCA, effectively making it legal for smartphone users to jailbreak and/or root their devices. These exemptions, however, were never made permanent and now, they're about to expire. The EFF doesn't want this to happen, which is why it's decided to launch a campaign dedicated to the jailbreaking cause. With this initiative, the EFF is hoping to convince the Copyright Office to renew its exemptions and expand them to a wider range of devices, including tablets and videogame consoles. To achieve this, the organization is calling upon programmers and other jailbreaking enthusiasts to contact the Copyright Office directly, explaining why the ability to freely modify software is so vital to their lives or livelihoods. As the EFF argues, "Concrete examples will help show the Copyright Office why they should renew and expand the exemptions for jailbreaking." If you're interested in getting involved, you can contact the Copyright Office at the coverage link below, though all comments are due by February 5th. Hit up the source link for more details on the EFF's involvement.

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Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:41:00 -050021|20157244http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/22/umg-v-veoh-victory-has-never-been-so-pyrrhic/%3Futm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%26ncid%3Drss_semi
http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/22/umg-v-veoh-victory-has-never-been-so-pyrrhic/http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/22/umg-v-veoh-victory-has-never-been-so-pyrrhic/%3Futm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%23comments
The US appeal court has ruled that "YouTube on steroids" site Veoh can't be sued for copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Judge Raymond Fisher said that rights holders (like UMG) were in a better place to identify infringing content than the video sharing site, putting the burden of finding and reporting dodgy vids on the record company's shoulders. The old-slugger's victory means that Viacom has less of a leg to stand on in its upcoming appeal against YouTube, since Judges can use the case as precedent to make their decisions. Sadly, victory will ring hollow for Veoh since the onslaught of litigation caused it to file for chapter seven bankruptcy before getting flogged on the cheap to Qlipso last year.